Browsing Posts tagged Apex predators

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Yip Harburg, the lyricist for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, had it in mind to craft an entire song about the scary creatures that lay hiding in the woodlands of the witch-beset kingdom on the other side of Kansas, but he never landed on the right lines, settling instead on those seven words as a chant for the travelers to repeat as a way of keeping themselves safe in the forest.

Traditional hunters and human residents of ecosystems everywhere have given considerably more thought to the importance of those creatures and their moral equivalents—orcas and wolves here, dingoes and panthers there—and how humans can live with them. In 1927, when British biologist Charles Elton published his formulation of the food chain, he placed those large animals at the top of what he called the food chain, pointing to the flow of energy by which sun feeds grass feeds rabbit feeds fox.

Elton’s successors refer to these creatures as “apex predators.” Biostatisticians point to the fact that these creatures, at the top end of the chain, are few, in mathematical proportion to the animals that feed them: A million mayflies may go into the hundred trout that feed a single grizzly bear in a good bout of hunting.

Their relative fewness means that the apex predators carry a lot of weight, so to speak, in the workings of an ecosystem. Everywhere in the world, though, those apex predators have been supplanted by a single creature, Homo sapiens, and everywhere the world’s ecosystems are feeling the radical effects of this onset of what other scientists have come to call the Anthropocene: that time in which humans behave on the earth as if a geological force—or, worse, an extinction-causing asteroid. continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.